On Monday August 26th, VMware announced the general availability of their vCloud Hybrid Service. This service, initially opened back in May to a restricted set of early adopters provides VMware customers with a means of being able to easily bring their workloads out of their own datacentres and into to the cloud.

For many customers this is exactly what they want – they may have been wanting to move some of their workloads off premise but found the prospect of switching to a full blown public cloud provider a scary prospect. vCHS offers them a great way to move workloads to the cloud without having to worry about migrating to new technologies, api compatibility or sourcing a new vendor. At Canonical we have a vision of complete workload portability across any public or private cloud. Sure, it is a requirement that the workloads run on Ubuntu but Ubuntu’s ubiquity in cloud is close to making this a reality and with our growth in usage for scale out workloads such as delivery of online infrastructure far outstripping that of other Linux platforms, it seems that end users don’t have a problem with it. It certainly seems that with our engagements around OpenStack, Nicira and vCHS, VMware believe in the ubiquity of Ubuntu in cloud. Combined with VMware’s ubiquity in the enterprise, between the 2 of us we are going to do some great things.

We’re excited to announce that Canonical is sponsoring and exhibiting at the forthcoming Dell Solutions Summit, August 27-29th, 2013 in Beijing, China.

Danica Han, our Director of Cloud Alliances for APAC, will be speaking at the summit about Canonical’s commitment to the Chinese market, how we meet the specific needs of Chinese users and how those customers can gain competitive advantage with Ubuntu Cloud and Client deployments.

This session will take place on August 28th from 1:30pm – 2:30pm in room 311B.

On our show pods, our team in China will showcase our market beating Cloud management and deployment solutions; Landscape – enabling customers to manage thousands of Ubuntu machines as easily as one and Juju - our game-changing Cloud service orchestration tool.

Additionally, we will be demonstrating UbuntuKylin, on Dell desktops, developed specifically for China and the Chinese user with the members of the CCN Joint Lab. UbuntuKylin was awarded the Number 1 China Open Source Project for 2013 at the eighth Open Source China – Open Source World Summit in Beijing and is an exciting development, bringing a world leading, open source desktop operating system enhanced specifically for China.

UbuntuKylin was the talk of the conference. The UbuntuKylin project is a collaborative effort between CSIP,2 Canonical and NUDT.3 Initially released in April 2013, UbuntuKylin is an official Ubuntu flavour that will follow the Ubuntu six-monthly release cycle.

UbuntuKylin was awarded the Number 1 China Open Source Project for the year. Dr Qiu ShanQin, President of COPU, mentioned the establishment of the CCN as one of the most important achievements to Chinese Open Source Industry in 2013. Jack Yu of NUDT, Project Manager of UbuntuKylin project, was named in the 2013 Top 10 Open Source Outstanding People in China. Dr Wu QinBo, the Dean of NUDT Computer Research Lab, presented the UbuntuKylin project and its impact to Chinese Software industry to the audience.

Also at the event, Mark Shuttleworth delivered a keynote to introduce Ubuntu and Ubuntu Touch to attendees.

As announced previously, there was a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums. The Ubuntu Forums are now back up and running. What follows is a detailed post mortem of the breach and corrective actions taken by the Canonical IS team. In summary, the root cause was a combination of a compromised individual account and the configuration settings in vBulletin, the Forums application software. There was no compromise of Ubuntu itself, or any other Canonical or Ubuntu services. We have repaired and hardened the Ubuntu Forums, and as the problematic settings are the default behaviour in vBulletin, we are working with vBulletin staff to change and/or better document these settings.

What happened

At 16:58 UTC on 14 July 2013, the attacker was able to log in to a moderator account owned by a member of the Ubuntu Community.

This moderator account had permissions to post announcements to the Forums. Announcements in vBulletin, the Forums software, may be allowed to contain unfiltered HTML and do so by default.

The attacker posted an announcement and then sent private messages to three Forum administrators (also members of the Ubuntu community) claiming that there was a server error on the announcement page and asking the Forum administrators to take a look.

One of the Forum administrators quickly looked at the announcement page, saw nothing wrong and replied to the private message from the attacker saying so. 31 seconds after the Forum administrator looked at the announcement page (and before the administrator even had time to reply to the private message), the attacker logged in as that Forum administrator.

Based on the above and conversations with the vBulletin support staff, we believe the attacker added an XSS attack in the announcement they posted which sent the cookies of any visitor to the page to the attacker.

Once the attacker gained administrator access in the Forums they were able to add a hook through the administrator control panel. Hooks in vBulletin are arbitrary PHP code which can be made to run on every page load. The attacker installed a hook allowing them to execute arbitrary PHP passed in a query string argument. They used this mechanism to explore the environment and also to upload and install two widely available PHP shell kits. The attacker used these shell kits to upload and run some custom PHP code to dump the ‘user’ table to a file on disk which they then downloaded.

The attacker returned on 20 July to upload the defacement page.

What the attacker could access

The attacker had full access to the vBulletin environment as an administrator and shell access as the ‘www-data’ user on the Forums app servers.

Having administrator access to the vBulletin environment means they were able to read and write to any table in the Forums database.

They used this access to download the ‘user’ table which contained usernames, email addresses and salted and hashed (using md5) passwords for 1.82 million users.

What the attacker could not access

We believe the attacker was NOT able to escalate past the ‘www-data’ user (i.e. gain root access) on the Forums app servers.

We believe the attacker was NOT able to escalate past remote SQL access to the Forums database on the Forums database servers.

We believe the attacker did NOT gain any access at all to the Forums front end servers.

We believe the attacker was NOT able to gain any access to any other Canonical or Ubuntu services.

We know the attacker was NOT able to gain access to any Ubuntu code repository or update mechanism.

What we don’t know

We don’t know how the attacker gained access to the moderator account used to start the attack.

The announcement the attacker posted was deleted by one of the Forum administrators so we don’t know exactly what XSS attack was used.

What we’ve done

Before bringing the Forums back online, we implemented a series of changes both designed to clean up after this attack and also to defend against and mitigate the fallout from possible attacks in the future.

Clean up

We sent individual mails to all Forums users informing them of the breach and that they should consider their Forum password compromised. We advised them to change this password on any other systems where they may have re-used it.

We backed up the servers running vBulletin, and then wiped them clean and rebuilt them from the ground up.

We randomised all user passwords in the Forums.

We reset all system and database passwords.

We manually imported data into a fresh database after sanity checking each table.

Hardening

We’ve removed the ability to modify or add new hooks except via root access to the database

We’ve disabled all potential HTML posting avenues in the Forums for everyone but administrators.

We’ve reviewed and further hardened the firewalling around the Forums servers.

We’ve reviewed and further hardened the PHP config on the server to close off some vectors used by the attacker.

We’ve switched to forcing HTTPS for the administrator and moderator control panels and made it optionally available everywhere else

We’ve improved escalation procedures for the Ubuntu Community members who graciously volunteer their time to administer and moderate the Forums.

We will continue to work with vBulletin staff to discuss changes to the default settings which could help others avoid similar scenarios as this. The vBulletin support staff have been helpful and cooperative throughout this incident.

Finally, we’d like once again to apologize for the security breach, the data leak and downtime.

We are pleased to announce Canonical are participating in Inktank’s forthcoming Ceph Days, taking place on:

- 1st August – New York, NY

- 12th September – Santa Clara, CA

- 9th October – London, UK

Attendees will get hands on through a Ceph installation workshop, and talk with experts in open source storage and cloud platforms. Canonical have several of our top consultants there giving talks and demonstrations of Juju, our powerful orchestration solution for cloud workloads as well as Landscape, our exclusive Ubuntu Systems Management tool.

During the day attendees will learn:

- The basics of Ceph

- Best practises for using Ceph

- How Ceph works with today’s cloud platforms

- How to get started using Ceph

After the workshop there will be plenty of time to network and chat with all the speakers and ask any remaining questions during a cocktail hour. Sign up today as space is limited and you will not want to miss this unique event!

Juju, the leading tool for continuous deployment, continuous integration (CI/CD), and cloud-neutral orchestration, now has a refreshed GUI with smoother workflows for integration professionals spinning up many services across clouds like Amazon EC2 and a range of public OpenStack providers. The new GUI speeds up service design – conceptual modelling of service relationships – as well as actual deployment, providing a visual map of the relationships between services.

“The GUI is now a first-class part of the Juju experience” said Gary Poster, whose team lead the work, “with an emphasis on rapid access to the collection of service charms and better visualisation of the deployment in question”. In this milestone the Juju GUI can act as a whiteboard, so a user can mock up the service orchestration they intend to create using the same Juju GUI that they will use to manage their real, live deployments. Users can experience the new interface for themselves at jujucharms.com with no need to setup software in advance.

Juju is used by organisations that are constantly deploying and redeploying collections of services. Companies focused on media, professional services, and systems integration are the heaviest users, who benefit from having repeatable best-practice deployments across a range of cloud environments.

Juju uniquely enables the reuse of shared components called ‘charms’ for common parts of a complex service. A large portfolio of existing open source components is available from a public Charm collection, and browsing that collection is built into the new GUI. Charms are easy to find and review in the GUI, with full documentation instantly accessible. Featured, recommended and popular charms are highlighted for easy discovery. Each Charm now has more detailed information including test results from all supported providers, download count, related Charms, and a Charm code quality rating. The Charm collection includes both certified, supported Charms, and a wider range of ad-hoc Charms that are published by a large community of contributors.

The simple browser-based interface makes it easy to find reusable open source charms that define popular services like Hadoop, Storm, Ceph, OpenStack, MySQL, RabbitMQ, MongoDB, Cassandra, Mediawiki and WordPress. Information about each service, such as configuration options, is immediately available, and the charms can then be dragged and dropped directly on a canvas where they can be connected to other services, deployed and scaled. It’s also possible to export these service topologies into a human-readable and -editable format that can be shared within a team or published as a reference architecture for that deployment.

Recent additions to the public Charm collection include OpenVPN AS, Liferay, Storm and Varnish. For developers the new GUI and Charm Browser mean that their Charms are now much more discoverable. For those taking part in the Charm Championship, it’s easier to upload their Charms and use the GUI to connect them into a full solution for entry into the competition. Submit your best Charmed solution for the possibility of winning $10,000.

The current version of Juju supports Amazon EC2, HP Cloud and many other OpenStack clouds, as well as in-memory deployment for test and dev scenarios. Juju is on track for a 1.12 release in time for Ubuntu 13.10 that will enhance scalability for very large deployments, and a 2.0 release in time for Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.

There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums site, ubuntuforums.org. We take information security and user privacy very seriously, and apologise for the breach and ensuing inconvenience.

At this time,

We have confirmed the attackers were able to access all user email addresses and hashed passwords on the Forums site. While the passwords were not stored in plain text, good practice dictates that users should assume the passwords have been accessed and change them. If users used the same password on other services they should immediately change that password.

We believe the issue is limited to the Ubuntu Forums and no other Ubuntu or Canonical site or service is affected.

We have begun the process of notifying by email all users whose details have been compromised.

We are continuing to investigate exactly how the attackers were able to gain access and are working with the software providers to address that issue. Once the investigation is concluded we will provide as much detail as we safely can.

The forums site will remain down until we can safely bring it up, and updates will be posted to the ubuntuforums.org page as they are available. Once again, we apologise for the issue.

In the meantime, if you’re using Ubuntu and need technical support please see the following page for support:

We are pleased to announce a seriously good addition to the our product team: Ratnadeep (Deep) Bhattacharjee. Deep joins Canonical as Director of Cloud Product Management from VMware where he led its Cloud Infrastructure Platform effort and has a solid understanding of customer needs as they continue to move to virtual and cloud infrastructure.

Ubuntu has fast become the operating system of choice for cloud computing and Ubuntu is the most popular platform for OpenStack. With Deep’s direction, we plan to continue to lead Ubuntu OpenStack into enterprises, carriers and service providers looking for new ways to deliver next generation infrastructure without the ‘enterprise’ price tag and lock in. He will also be key in building out our great integration story with VMWare to help customers who will run heterogeneous environments. Welcome Deep!

In April at the OpenStack Summit, Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth quipped “My OpenStack, how you’ve grown” as a reference to the thousands of people in the room. OpenStack is indeed growing up and it seems incredible that this Friday, we celebrate OpenStacks’ 3rd Birthday.

Incredible – it seems like only yesterday OpenStack was a twinkle in the eyes of a few engineers getting together in Austin. Incredible that OpenStack has come so far in such a short time. Ubuntu has been with OpenStack every day of the 3 year journey so far which is why the majority of OpenStack clouds are built on Ubuntu Server and Ubuntu OpenStack continues to be one of the most popular OpenStack distributions available.

It is also why we are proud to host the London OpenStack 3rd Birthday Party at our HQ in London. We’d love to see you using OpenStack with Ubuntu and even if you don’t, you should come and celebrate OpenStack with on Friday, July 19th.

Ubuntu developer contest offers $10,000 for the most innovative charms

Developers around the world are already saving time and money thanks to Juju, and now they have the opportunity to win money too. Today marks the opening of the Juju Charm Championship, in which developers can reap big rewards for getting creative with Juju charms.

If you haven’t met Juju yet, now’s the ideal time to dive in. Juju is a service orchestration tool, a simple way to build entire cloud environments, deploy scale and manage complex workloads using only a few commands. It takes all the knowledge of an application and wraps it up into a re-usable Juju charm, ready to be quickly deployed anywhere. And you can modify and combine charms to create a custom deployment that meets your needs.

Juju is a powerful tool, and its flexibility means it’s capable of things we haven’t even imagined yet. So we’re kicking off the Charm Championship to discover what happens when the best developers bring Juju into their clouds — with big rewards on offer.

The prizes

As well as showing off the best achievements to the community, our panel of judges will award $10,000 cash prizes to the best charmed solutions in a range of categories.

That’s not all. Qualifying participants will be eligible for a joint marketing programme with Canonical, including featured application slots on ubuntu.com, joint webinars and more. Win the Charm Championship and your app will reach a whole new audience.

Get started today

If you’re a Juju wizard, we want to see what magic you’re already creating. If you’re not, now’s a great time to start — it only takes five minutes to get going with Juju.

The Charm Championship runs until 1 October 2013, and it’s open to individuals, teams, companies and organisations. For more details and full com

“May you live in interesting times.” This Chinese proverb probably resonates well with teams running OpenStack in production over the last 18 months. But, at the OpenStack Summit in Portland, Ubuntu and Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth demonstrated that life is going to get much less ‘interesting’ for people running OpenStack and that is a good thing.

OpenStack has come a long way in a short time. The OpenStack Summit event in April attracted 3000 attendees with pretty much every significant technology company represented.

Only 12 months ago, being able to install OpenStack in under a few hours was deemed to be an extraordinary feat. Since then deployment tools such as Juju have simplified the process and today very large companies such as AT&T, HP and Deutsche Telekom have been able to rapidly push OpenStack Clouds into production. This means the community has had to look into solving the next wave of problems – managing the cloud in production, upgrading OpenStack, upgrading the underlying infrastructure and applying security fixes – all without disrupting services running in the cloud.

With the majority of OpenStack clouds running on Ubuntu, Canonical has been uniquely positioned to work on this. We have spent 18 months building out Juju and Landscape, our service orchestration and systems management tools to solve these problems, and at the Summit, Mark Shuttleworth demonstrated just how far they have come. During a 30 min session, Mark performed kernel upgrades on a live running system without service interruption. He talked about the integrations and partnerships in place with VMWare, Microsoft and Inktank that mean these technologies can be incorporated into an OpenStack Cloud on Ubuntu with ease. This is is the kind of practicality that OpenStack users need and represents how OpenStack is growing up. It also makes OpenStack less “interesting” and far more adoptable by a typical user which is what OpenStack needs in order to continue its incredible growth. We at Canonical aim to be with it every step of the way.

Today marks another milestone for Ceph with the release of Cuttlefish (v0.61), the third stable release of Ceph. Inktank’s development efforts for the Cuttlefish release have been focused around Red Hat support and making it easier to install and configure Ceph while improving the operational ease of integrating with 3rdparty tools, such as provisioning and billing systems. As ever, there have also been a ton of new features we have added to the object and block capabilities of Ceph, as well as with the underlying storage cluster (RADOS), alongside some great contributions from the community.

So what’s new for Ceph users in Cuttlefish?

Ease of installation:

Ceph-deploy: a new deployment tool which requires no other tools and allows a user to start running a multi-node Ceph cluster in minutes. Ideal for users who want to do quick proof of concepts with Ceph.

Chef recipes: a new set of reference Chef recipes for deploying a Ceph storage cluster, which Inktank will keep authoritative as new features emerge in Ceph. These are in addition to the Puppet scripts contributed by eNovance and Bloomberg, the Crowbar Barclamps developed with Dell, and the Juju charms produced in conjunction by Canonical, ensuring customers can install Ceph using most popular tools.

Fully tested RPM packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and derivatives, available on both the ceph.com repo and in EPEL (Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux).

Administrative functionality:

Admins can now create, delete or modify users and their access keys as well as manipulate and audit users’ bucket and object data using the RESTful API of the Ceph Object Gateway. This makes it easy to hook Ceph into provisioning or billing systems.

Administrators can now quickly and easily set a quota for a RADOS pool. This helps with capacity planning management as well as preventing specific Ceph clients from consuming all available data at the expense of other users.

In addition, to the pool quotas, administrators can now quickly see the total used and available capacity of a cluster using the ceph df command, very similar to how the generic UNIX df command works with other local file systems.

Ceph Block Device (RBD) Incremental Snapshots

It is now possible to just take a snapshot of the recent changes to a Ceph block image. Not only does this reduce the amount of space needed to store snapshots on a cluster, but forms the foundation for delivering disaster recovery options for volumes, as part of the popular cloud platforms such as OpenStack and CloudStack.

You can see the complete list of features in the release notes are available at http://ceph.com/docs/master/release-notes/. You can also check out our roadmap page for more information on what’s coming up in future releases of Ceph. If you would like to contribute towards Ceph, you can visit Ceph.com for more information on how you can get started and we invite you to join our online Ceph Development Summit on Tuesday May 7th, more details available at http://wiki.ceph.com.

The emergence of public cloud computing has changed the IT landscape for developers and enterprises, making it significantly easier and more cost effective to develop and deploy new applications, services and infrastructure. Enterprises can choose among cloud providers to meet their needs for performance, features, price and flexibility that will support their technology strategy today as well as in the future.

Today, Microsoft Corp. has announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, its public cloud offering with the ability to create and manage both Windows and Linux virtual machines. As part of Canonical’s Certified Public Cloud Program, Ubuntu on Windows Azure is fully certified and has been tested and optimized by Canonical and Microsoft for excellent performance and reliability. Enterprises that require both Windows and Linux can choose the right operating system for running their workloads based on application performance and availability.

Canonical and Microsoft have been working together to make Ubuntu run seamlessly on Windows Azure. As Bob Kelly, Corporate Vice President, Server and Tools Business at Microsoft commented:

“Windows Azure is committed to openness and interoperability. Having Ubuntu available to Windows Azure users is a big step forward for interoperability in the public cloud. Our customers can deploy mission critical applications on both Windows Server and Linux and across both public and private clouds.”

Ubuntu Server is highly available, secure, built for scale and provides the tools that simplify and reduce the cost of cloud deployments. So, for enterprises looking to deploy demanding cloud oriented workloads such as Hadoop, Cassandra and other scale out type applications, Ubuntu on Windows Azure will be a familiar and well suited offering that provides maximum deployment flexibility. This includes hybrid clouds where applications and data can remain behind the company firewall for security or compliance reasons, and that are able to access public cloud resources on demand. As the leading guest OS in most major public clouds, Ubuntu can be deployed across multiple public clouds at scale for pricing and redundancy benefits as well as avoiding lock-in to a single cloud provider.

At Canonical, we invest in the Ubuntu experience to provide the most complete combination of performance, update handling, compliance and reliability in the market. We also extend our commercial offerings of support, systems management, audit compliance and IP assurance to commercial customers using Ubuntu on certified public clouds.

In May 2012, Dell launched the OpenStack Cloud Reference Architecture using Ubuntu 12.04 LTS on select PowerEdge-C series servers. Today’s announcement expands upon that offering by combining the benefits of Ubuntu Server Certification, Ubuntu Advantage enterprise support, and Dell Hardware ProSupport across the PowerEdge line.

Dell customers can now deploy with confidence when purchasing Dell PowerEdge servers with Dell Hardware ProSupport and Ubuntu Advantage. When these customers call into Dell, their service tag numbers will be entitled with ProSupport and Ubuntu Advantage, which will create a seamless support experience via the collaborative Dell and Canonical support and engineering relationship.

If you are interested in purchasing Ubuntu Advantage for your Dell PowerEdge servers, please contact the Dell Solutions team at Canonical. If your business is already using or thinking about using a supported Ubuntu Server infrastructure in your data-center then be sure to fill out the annual Ubuntu Server and Cloud Survey to provide additional feedback.

Mobile World Congress kicks off today and we’re gearing up to show off Ubuntu running on multiple devices. We’ll be demonstrating phones, tablets and desktops at the stand, have Ubuntu developers flashing spare hardware, as well as be showing integration and interoperability with Orange and Deutsche Telekom through the GSMA’s One API initiative.

GSMA’s OneAPI initiative aims to provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable applications to exploit mobile network capabilities, such as messaging, authentication, payments and location-finding with a cross-operator reach. For example, a payment network API could be used to add an in-app purchase directly to the user’s mobile phone bill.

Ubuntu is the first smartphone operating system to be able to demonstrate integration and interoperability with a carrier’s authentication and billing systems. Working with Deutsche Telekom and Orange, we’ll show how a single API can be used to instantly log users in with their operator identity and seamlessly link that with Ubuntu One, Ubuntu’s identity and payments services, and provide carrier billing options upon purchase of music and eventually, apps.

This is a massive step forward for the industry as the GSMA and partners such as Canonical, are spearheading an initiative to standardise access to operator facilities via network APIs across all operators. The initiative will benefit operators, developers and consumers:

It puts operators in a position to forge stronger relationships with their customers.

For developers, OneAPI reduces the time and effort needed to create applications for and content that is portable across mobile operators, increasing reach and ultimately enhancing the consumer experience.

For consumers, it makes it really quick and easy to make application purchases directly from their phone. It’s also more secure because it’s not necessary to input credit card details for each purchase.

Also at Mobile World Congress:

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, will participate in a keynote panel discussion alongside Mozilla and Tizen on Tuesday 26th Feb at 18.00 at the MWC Conference Auditorium and broadcast live on Mobile World Live

We’ll be taking part in the App Developer Day on Tuesday 26th Feb. Stuart Langridge, technical architect at Canonical will be presenting the Ubuntu phone, SDK, HTML5 and native apps as well as discussing app development for Ubuntu on phones and tablets. We’ll also have engineers available at the event to flash spare handsets with Touch Developer Preview of Ubuntu. This will take place from 9.00-9.30 and 11.40-11.55, and 13.30-14.00 in Hall 8.0, Theatre A.

The GSMA Seminar on “Unlocking Value with Network APIs” will run on Thursday 28th from 9am to 10.30 am in Room CC1.1. Canonical’s Stuart Langridge will present and demo the Ubuntu Phone during the session. We’ll also be demonstrating Ubuntu’s OneAPI solution at the GSMA stand daily.

Look out for Ubuntu engineers who will flash spare hardware with developer images for phone and tablet throughout the show close to the Ubuntu stand.

Dell announced today an updated XPS 13, preloaded with Ubuntu, which has a full high-definition 1080p display. It will be available for sale in the USA and Canada, but as part of this update Dell will also be making it available in parts of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

As we reported in November, the Dell XPS 13 is a high-end ultramobile laptop, offering developers a complete client-to-cloud experience. It is the result of Dell’s bold Sputnik initiative which embraced the community and received terrific response from developers around the world. With Ubuntu 12.04 LTS preloaded, the machine is perfect for developers and anyone who wants high speed, brilliant graphics and smart design.

If you’re keen to get your hands on a new Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition with Ubuntu pre-loaded, check-out our web page for more details and links:

Starting today, users can install the Steam Client with a few simple clicks in our Software Center, the fastest and safest way to install thousands of paid and free applications on Ubuntu. Canonical and Valve have worked closely together to make Ubuntu the best performing open platform for gaming and now the ultimate entertainment platform is fully supported.

To celebrate this release Steam has every Ubuntu title on sale for 50-75% off until Thursday, 21 February at 10:00am US Pacific time in what is the first of many Steam sales. Steam also brings with it some amazing Valve titles on Ubuntu, Half-Life, Counter-Strike and the free to play Team Fortress 2. As a launch giveaway and for the hardcore gamers who need every item in Team Fortress, for a limited time when you play Team Fortress 2 on Ubuntu you will get a Tux penguin item to keep or trade.

We welcome all the new Steam users who can now upgrade to Ubuntu. Steam Big Picture running on your Ubuntu computer connected to the living room TV is a great way to experience the future today. Canonical looks forward to the steady progress of games from all our partners on Ubuntu on the desktop and soon on the Ubuntu phone and tablet in due course.

We are exhibiting at this year’s CeBIT event on March 5-9th, 2013 in Hannover Germany, in conjunction with our partner in the region, Teuto.net and we’re giving away number of free tickets to selected customers and partners. If you are interested in one of these tickets, please contact me at anthony.beckley@canonical.com for more information.

The Canonical/Teuto.net stand will be in the Open Source Arena (Hall 6, Stand F16, (030) and we will be showcasing two enterprise technology areas:

We will be running hourly demonstrations on our stand and attendees have the chance to win a Google Nexus 7 tablet! Simply come to out stand and watch a short demo or your chance to win If you would like to pre-register for a demonstration, email me at anthony.beckley@canonical.com

We look forward to seeing you at the show!

CeBIT draws a live audience of more than 3,000 people from over 100 different countries. In just five days the show delivers a panoramic view of the digital world’s mainstay markets: ICT and Telecommunications, Digital Media also Consumer Electronics.
To learn more about CeBIT click here.

Today’s inauguration of Barack Obama to his second term provides a good opportunity to look back at last year’s campaign and appreciate it in a bit more detail. We’ll skip discussion of the adverts, polls, photo ops, sound bites, political theatre and even the much appreciated informed debate on the issues, and focus instead on the interesting stuff – the IT infrastructure that powers something as dynamic as a presidential campaign. You can imagine the demands placed on such an infrastructure – scalability, reliability, cost effectiveness, manageability, openness, cloud. Once you have those requirements in mind, the clear choice for meeting those demands is Ubuntu. And so it’s no surprise that the Obama campaign reached the same conclusion. We recently spoke with Harper Reed, the CTO of the Obama campaign, about the challenges he faced and solutions he and his team put in place during the campaign. We’ve published that piece in honour of today’s inauguration; you can find it on our new Insights blog.